Sirona Says

The Recruitment Phoenix is starting to rise, but how do you make it fly?

Today's post is a first for my blog - it is written by a guest writer. Over the next few weeks and months I have a number of fantastic guest writers lined up to share with you some great content from the world of recruitment. They are all experts in their particular subject matter, and none of them are particularly shy about that fact, either!
So expect to raise a few eyebrows, draw deep breathes and get your keyboard ready to comment on them!!

The subject of the recession is very close to a recruiters heart - but more importantly their wallet!! Recruiters are rewarded on successfully placing candidates, but if the jobs are not there, then, well the rest is obvious. So where do recruiters go from here?

Let me introduce Bill Boorman....

Some of you in the recruitment industry will already know Bill as a successful recruitment trainer (he is the MD of Bill Boorman Consultancy, supporting recruiters and recruitment companies across Europe) , but lately he is becoming better known for his use of social media, particlarly Twitter (you can follow him @billboorman) as communication tools in the recruitment sphere. He also hosts a Blogtalk radio show and is very active as the owner of his LinkedIn Group - The Good News Group (Recruiters). Last week he presented an interesting topic - Phoenix Recruiting - to the recruitment conference in Dallas, TalentNetLive.

I asked him to share what I felt were some very salient points from his presentation, and they do make for good reading. As I said earlier, you may choose to agree or disagree with Bill's point of view. But one thing is for sure, the Recruitment Phoenix is rising, and recruiters are going to have to change.

Over to you Bill...........

A tweet goes a long way. I have recently been presenting a keynote entitled Phoenix recruiting, the road to recovery, most recently in Dallas, Texas. From London to Lagos, the challenge is the same, as the market recovers the challenge is timing and tactics. Doing the right things at the right times to make the most of the better days.
In terms of timing, recruiters are in a unique position to predict where the market is going next because we are closest to employer confidence and deal with a wide range of companies across most sectors. Based on this, you can split the recession in to 4 key stages:

Stage 1: Temp business increases while perm business stalls. Lots of jobs withdrawn at the final stages as companies get concerned about future business. Happened in the UK from July – October last year. Temp recruiters were asking “What recession” and applying the ostrich strategy.

Stage 2: Temp business drops dramatically with little or no perm activity or opportunity. Recruiters go in to panic mode with no pipeline. What jobs are around have little or no commitment. Discover social media to look busy! From November 08 – March 09 plenty of recruiters exit, become career coaches or become experts in outplacement. The dark days.

Stage 3: Temp numbers slowly increase. (I measure number of companies using) rather than total numbers. Perm placements start to happen with some pipeline appearing. Recruiters dare to think ahead. Better conversions of jobs to placements. Week on week this has slowly happened from March 2009. The key here is not to compare with last year (all time high) but last quarter. Employer confidence is returning with skeleton workforce stretched by new business. Employers dip their toe in through temp & interim to cope then plunge in to full time hires.

Stage 4: Temp numbers reach a high with plenty of perm jobs converting. Business back to respectable level. Happy days again :-) My forecast for this is May 11th 2011!
Time to get the new car brochures out and remember what it was like to eat out and go on holiday

Where are we now and what does it mean?

Recruitment and Retention has now just got harder!!

While I appreciate that the whole world is having recruitment challenges, I wanted to highlight two problems that I feel are going to impact massively on recruitment and retention. I have actually already experienced both of them with candidates in the last few weeks, and I am sure it will just get worse.

So what am I talking about? Petrol and Houses. The price of petrol is rising higher and higher every week, so obviously your staff (and you of course) will be paying more for their commute into work. With this price estimated to get to £1.50 per litre by the end of the summer, then their commuting costs (by car) have just risen by 50%. How many will be looking to get a job closer to home to cut down traveling? What are you doing about it? Are you encouraging more home working? Are you being flexible with allowing them to come into the office less? Are you actually sharing your concerns with your staff? If you don't they will look for an employer that is doing something about it.

House prices - more importantly the mortgage rate - are stopping people moving. Higher interest rates mean that mortgages have lept up substantially this year, costing people more money. There are two implications from this, 1) they may now not be earning enough money where they currently work, and may have to look at another job and leaving your company or 2) the option of relocating for a new job has suddenly been diminished for the moment, not because they don't want to move, but because they may not sell their house! So recruiting for specific skills in a market where they are absent now becomes a real problem. Whereas, before you could relocate someone with the right skills, now it will become more of a challenge to convince candidates to move. So if this is going to cause you problems, what are you doing about it? Have you even thought of the long term implications? Should you be reconsidering recruiting lower skilled and training them? Should you look at retraining of existing staff? What about ad hoc pay rises?

The one thing that both petrol prices and house prices will definitely test, and that will be how creative a company can be with their creative retention policies!!!!

Have you experienced The Frustration Cycle

This is one of the most frustrating parts of being a recruiter - when a company tells you they want to recruit, but then tell you they haven't the time to do it. Here is my interpretation of this annoyance - I have called it The Frustration Cycle!!

 

Anyone suffer the same?

Job for Life - not for us say the Generation Y'ers!

Believe it or not, ten years have passed since the phrase that went into HR and Recruitment immortality - The War for Talent - was born. It was actually Mckinsey that created it in their report of the same name. But many years after this initial offering, it could be that 'war' might be the right word!!

European demographics are changing and according to CIPD statistics, by 2010 47% of the European working population will be aged 55years and older!!

Cities beginning with letter 'B' are not good places to work

If you are looking for a new job, don't go to Brighton, Bristol or Belfast to find one. Thats the message from Badenoch & Clark’s latest quarterly Happiness at Work survey. Apparently, office workers in these cities are the least happy at work - I find that strange having worked in two of them, they are not that bad, honestly!!

The survey goes on to say that the unhappiest profession is HR (again!) with nearly a third of them unhappy in their jobs. Maybe that is why so many HR people give recruiters a hard time then - if they are not happy in their jobs, they could be taking it out on recruiters! (Maybe it's just me who has experienced this??)

The staggering figure the survey does highlight is that 48% (yes, nearly half!) of workers want to change jobs in 2008!! There is certainly a few retention AND recruitment issues  to be addressed there then!

2008 - The Perfect Storm is Brewing

No I don't mean that weather thing, or the "alleged" impending financial meltdown. I am referring to waves that will be caused by the combination of fast advancing internet technology, the rise of a generation of (very) net-savvy collaborative people and global economic interdependence.
To survive these resulting waves in 2008, companies will just have to work out how to ride them, taking notice of the growing number of organisations who are already doing this, such as Microsoft, Amazon and Wikipedia. They will have to look to self generated content such as blogs, online community sites based on the already successful concept of MySpace and Facebook and social networks such LinkedIn and Ning - all within the corporate environment.All these forms of direct inputs, will be essential to companies as they seek to improve their products, processes and their services. This impending perfect storm is changing both the rules of business and the way that companies manage their people - communication and the share of knowledge and insight via "open-source" collaboration is a direction that companies of the 21st century must adopt. If they choose to try and ride the storm without looking to the future and making changes, then they will find the going very rough indeed.